Grit Lab Report

Hi Sarah,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 6: I have an interest that is central to my identity. That is, what I do is an important part of who I am .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were benevolence, achievement, and self-direction.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.

You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and verbal.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a pretty good idea about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to making smoothies .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said network with someone new .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said powerful .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Overthinking // caring what others think .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I want to watch tv on Friday afternoon during lunch I will post a short LinkedIn piece of content .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in App building .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt fight or flight when receiving critical feedback, and fight or flight when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being disbelief in me .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel awe .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

i want to do something about how those with low income / adversity prone upbringings have higher likelihoods of long term health problems in their process of overcoming their obstacles
when the next step is unclear it's difficult to continue
Personality can change
Ask for advice and story
It's not about experience it's about reflection that creates learnings
Add "stakes" to woop - woops
Love the texting parents 3 grateful things
Choose easy and systemize
Relationships matter just like achivement
Be a giver but don't burn out

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Nikita Venugopal
Despite having known Sarah since freshman year, I find something new to admire about her with every interaction. Her passion, humor, and energy are both admirable and infectious. She can bring anyone out of their shell and make anyone feel like they belong. Even before this course, Sarah has been one of the grittiest people I know. Her passion for her entrepreneurship ventures can be felt from miles away, and despite entrepreneurship being an inherently obstacle-filled space, she always adapts, pivots, perseveres, and grows. I have no doubt in my mind that Sarah will reach her top-level goal of creating products and systems that change the world for the better, and I cannot wait to help her in any way I can, every step of the way. Knowing Sarah, I feel like her discovery project was a perfect choice. I was excited to see that she tried out a Youtube channel, as she had mentioned wanting to try this many times, but had not yet pulled the trigger. I also appreciated her title of "making money make sense." This idea aligns so well with her natural desire to bring others up to where she has fought to be, using knowledge she has fought to gain. Sarah's natural charisma was also on full display during her presentation, itself, and I loved hearing about what she learned from her project, and about what she plans to do next.
Tanmayee Talla
Sarah, thanks for bringing your humor to every single Grit Lab class (and thank you for your pencils :)) You brought such a fun and lighthearted approach to every conversation, and I genuinely looked forward to hanging with you for a bit during class. I really respect and admire the way you pursue your passions, and I am going to try to embody that virtue in my own life. I would love to get coffee or something outside of class soon:) Regarding your Discovery Project, I really appreciated the pun title. It was awesome to see how you built a website for your mom's business and how your Discovery Project transformed the way that you see your purpose. My main takeaway from your project was that rather than focusing on how we can help everyone, focus on how we can help and affect the people immediately around us or who fulfill a certain niche that can benefit from our insights.
Annabel Chang
For Sarah: Sarah’s infectious humor was immediately noticeable upon our first meeting. She had no qualms about making new friends, and instantly began joking and chatting with us. I found her humor relatable, and though it took me a while to situate myself, we soon became good friends. During pair-and-shares, I started to tell her funny and personal stories from my own life, and she would poke fun at me in good nature. She never fails to make me laugh. I could also tell Sarah was a born natural leader. She often took lead of group discussions but remained attentive and inclusive of all teammates. She knew when to be serious, and when to be light-hearted. Whenever we prepared to be called on to share what we have discussed, she always volunteered to be the designated speaker, to our collective relief. Her outgoing and friendly personality is something I aspire to be like. She would often offer to accompany Tanmayee to the gym, as Tanmayee wanted to start an exercise routine, or offer to make food with Nikita for her project. She was always eager to help in any way possible. I also discovered that we shared a similar interest in weightlifting. It was rare for me to find a girl with the same hobby, so I greatly enjoyed discussing our various techniques and routines. Sarah has been a great friend and teammate, and I am so fortunate to have met her. Sarah’s project was refreshing and unique. It revolved around her desire to help people understand and make money. I knew this project was something she was deeply passionate about, as she had previously spoken about starting a TikTok and YouTube channel that educated the public about finance. She had already begun developing a brand concept, and even shot a couple videos. I admired her drive in pursuit of this passion, and appreciated her desire to “pay it forward” by helping others. Her altruistic nature was evident in her project too, as she spoke about helping specific friends develop their business. I was happy to see someone so inspired by the idea of self-transcendence that they would help others achieve their dreams.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.